


Got Those AU Blues

by Penknife



Category: Leverage
Genre: Bickering, Multi, Not Actually A Robot AU, Not Actually A Soulmate AU, Not Actually A Time Travel AU, Not Actually A Werewolf AU, Not Actually a Coffee Shop AU, Seasons 1-5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-17 23:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19964695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: Five times they aren'treallyin an alternate universe.





	Got Those AU Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wafflelate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wafflelate/gifts).



“Here you go,” Eliot said. “One café macchiato.”

Hardison watched the woman on the other side of the counter lift the cup, frown, sip, and sputter. “That isn’t a macchiato.”

“Yes, it is,” Eliot growled. “If you wanted a latte, you should have asked for a latte.”

“I want a caramel macchiato.”

“That’s an upside-down latte. From Starbucks. Do we look like Starbucks?”

“Why don’t you serve her what she wants?” Parker said, in a tone that suggested she was about to stab somebody with a fork.

“Because it’s not what she ordered.”

“Right now,” Parker said, fixing him with an axe-murderer stare, and Eliot started remaking the drink, but under protest.

“I don’t see why you get to be the manager,” Hardison complained once the customer had stomped off with her caramel-laden travesty.

Parker shrugged. “Because Nate said I won’t make the drinks right, and you won’t be mean to people, and people will get suspicious if the manager is nice to them.”

“I could be mean to people,” Eliot muttered.

“And he said Hardison would get distracted and take apart the espresso machine.”

“I wouldn’t get distracted, I just, I have ideas for making it more efficient.”

“No,” Parker said, making the word a complete sentence. “Not corporate policy.”

“You are scary like this,” Hardison said, and fiddled experimentally with the steam lever.

*****

“Aaagh! The full moon!” Eliot exclaimed, recoiling dramatically. Then his whole posture shifted, and he bared teeth in an expression that wasn’t a smile.

“Grrrr,” Parker said, making an incredibly unsettling noise deep in her throat, her fingers curling like claws. “I smell … prey.”

“Lock yourself in!” Hardison said, shoving the terrified businessman through the storage room door. “You don’t want to see this! Don’t open the door to anyone!”

“Arroooooooo!” Parker threw back her head and howled. It was a good howl, and it sounded even better when Hardison cued up the sound effect of answering howls from all over the building.

“That should keep him out of our way,” Eliot said. He and Parker were already striding back toward the van, and Hardison scrambled to keep up.

“I could have been a werewolf, too,” Hardison said.

“Yeah, a funny werewolf. Nate wanted serious werewolves,” Eliot said.

“I could be serious. I could be a serious werewolf.”

“Sophie says playing a werewolf is about letting out your inner desire to just turn around and bite somebody,” Parker said. She whirled around and snapped her teeth at him.

“Don’t do that to a person.”

“See. Me and Eliot have a part of us that really wants to bite people.”

“So does Nate,” Eliot said. “Sophie doesn’t, and you don’t.”

“I feel judged,” Hardison says.

“It just means you’re not angry all the time,” Parker said. “That’s a good thing.”

“If you bit me, I might turn into a werewolf,” Hardison said, although he didn’t really expect to get very far with that.

*****

“The light of the crystal ball will reveal your soulmate marks,” Sophie said grandly, holding out one hand to the two very rich and very clueless people sitting at the table with her. Hardison knew what to expect, but even he was impressed by how good the glowing marks revealed by the ultraviolet light from the crystal ball looked.

“An arrow!” the girl exclaimed. “And you said you were on the Olympic archery team.”

The guy looked equally thrilled. “And mine is a fish, and you have all those pet fish.”

“So many fish,” Hardison murmured. “Like, weird numbers of fish.”

Sophie shot him a quelling glance. “It does look like it’s meant to be. Oh, this is exciting!”

“You know this ink is eventually going to wear off,” Hardison said after their two marks had left, sporting their marks.

“They only have to believe they’re soulmates for a few days,” Sophie said. “After that, it’s up to them.”

“I think all this soulmate stuff is weird,” Parker said.

“I think it’s romantic,” Sophie said. “The idea that you’re inescapably drawn to someone.”

“Inescapably,” Parker said. “Sounds like prison.”

“You’d break out of prison in about ten minutes,” Hardison said.

“Still.”

“It’s not about ‘inescapably,’” Eliot said, a little bit surprisingly, since his dating life didn’t exactly strike Hardison as a search for true love. “It’s about finding where you fit.”

“Thank you,” Sophie said.

“Maybe you don’t fit with just one person,” Parker said.

Sophie smiled like she knew a secret. “Anything could happen,” she said.

*****

“I swear this is God’s honest truth,” Hardison said. “You think that man in there is your boss, but actually he’s part of the robot invasion.”

“You really expect me to believe that my boss has been replaced by a robot from outer space?” the lady said, but she was still listening. Her boss wasn’t an alien robot, but he was definitely a jerk, so Hardison figured it wouldn’t take a while lot to tip her into spilling his secrets.

“I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t believe it, either, but then I met these two, and my eyes were opened.” He turned to Parker and Eliot. “I think we have to trust her. She has to know the real truth.”

“The truth is that we’re robots,” Parker said, and opened the panel on her arm to reveal a tangle of wiring and lights.

“Robots,” Eliot repeated mechanically, and opened an identical panel on his own arm.

“I can’t believe it. You look so human.” Her eyes lit up, and Hardison knew they had her. “This explains so much.”

He refrained from saying that as far as he could tell, her boss’s behavior was fueled by plain old entitlement and greed, not by being replaced by robot overlords.

“The robot wants to take over your company. You have to help us stop him.”

“You help,” Eliot said, and smiled at the lady in a not-particularly-robotic way.

“Do I have to tell you that robots don’t flirt?” Hardison said when they’d extracted the information they needed and sent their mark’s assistant on her way.

“They might,” Parker said. “Beep boop.” She got all up into his face, and Parker pressed against him while making robot noises was undeniably weird, but not actually a bad kind of weird.

“I could be down with that,” Hardison said.

“I am not making robot noises,” Eliot said, but Hardison still felt the idea had promise.

*****

“I think I’ve done it,” Hardison said, tapping away at the dusty computer in the dilapidated office. “I’ve opened up the same temporal vortex that sent us through time.”

“Then we can go home?” the harried company owner gasped. He was looking a little the worse for wear for this tour through the dystopian future.

“I wish I could say yes, but I can’t do that. The power consumption is just—you don’t even want to know. But what I can do is create a tachyonic network connection with your computer in this same location, but ten years in the past.”

“He means you can still change it,” Parker said. She met their mark’s eyes, serious and calm, and the man hung on her every word like he was drowning and she’d thrown him a lifeline. “You can cancel the sale of the weapon that caused all this.”

“What happens when I do?”

“None of this will ever have happened,” Hardison said. “You might remember a little bit of it, kind of fuzzily.” Like someone they were going to shoot up with a bunch of drugs. “But the rest of the world goes back to just the way it was.”

“And lots of people don’t die,” Parker said.

“I’ll do it,” the man said, like deciding not to bring a dubiously legal weapon that was obviously tailor-made for terrorism to market was the equivalent of being Mother Theresa. “I’ve cancelled the sale. We’ll pull our design from production.”

“Yes, you will,” Hardison said. He’d captured the man’s passwords, and intended to use them to make sure that his change of heart stuck.

Once they had the man sleeping soundly in his own office chair, and they’d cleaned up the building so that it no longer looked deserted for a decade, Hardison couldn’t help asking on the way home, “So if you could change something you’d done in the past, what would you change?”

“Do we have to do hypothetical questions?” Eliot said.

“I’m just saying, there are some things I would change. Mostly times when I got caught.”

“Well, stuff like that, sure,” Eliot said. There was a pause. “And some other stuff. Stuff I don’t want to talk about. I think we’ve all got plenty of regrets.”

“I wouldn’t change anything,” Parker said.

“Not even the times that you didn’t get away with the big score you were after?” Eliot sounded skeptical.

“That isn’t a lot of times,” Parker said.

“Still, even your record isn’t perfect,” Eliot said. “Nobody wins them all.”

“I still wouldn’t change anything,” Parker said. She shook her head firmly. “What if I changed something and it meant I never met the two of you?”

“Well, obviously that would be terrible,” Hardison said after a moment. “Remind me to never invent time travel.”

“You can’t invent time travel,” Eliot said.

“I could if I wanted to. I just don’t want to.”

“No one can travel in time. What’s done is done.”

“That works for me,” Hardison said, and went on driving them home.


End file.
